atomic pop

There’s a new rumbling at the ranch. After years of riding a sport bike, I’ve apparently caught whatever bug it is that drove Stephanie to buy a cruiser not long ago. I think it started when I rode her bike home from the shop when she bought it. Though her bike doesn’t fit me and I consequently found it uncomfortable on the freeway, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed riding it, especially at in-town speeds. When I’m on my VFR, it always seems like the speed limit or the traffic are holding me back. On the cruiser, putting along at the speed limit seems just fine.

And so, after a crazy week or so of research and test rides, yesterday I brought home a brand old (2006, but with only 582 miles) Vulcan Meanstreak, which my trekkie friends will likely tell me is an oxymoron if they don’t know that it’s 1552cc cruiser made by Kawasaki. I even considered a Harley, but I’m not ready for that serious of an investment in a cruiser yet.

Here’s the bike that Stephanie calls, “The Meanie”.

A great big “Thank you!” to Zunerama and DLO is in order. I won a drawing for a free DLO HomeDock for Zune. All I had to do was post a picture of myself or a friend with my Zune. I chose one of the pictures below, with Lina in my Zune, and what-do-you-know? I won. I’d like to think it was because Lina’s so cute, but I’ve been assured the drawing was random.

It arrived today.

Here it is, playing Rodrigo y Gabriela on our (coincidently) new amplifier.

Yes, I have a Zune. Yes, it’s brown. Yes, I like it.

The one thing that I really found limiting was the capacity. I don’t need 80 GB, but I definitely need more than 30. I’ve been using the Zune Pass subscription a lot; it lets me download and listen to a lot of music I’d probably never have heard or bought, and combined with my ripped CDs, I filled my Zune. I tried deleting older music, but couldn’t find enough that I was ready to part with to make a real difference. Yeah, I haven’t listened to Dark Side of the Moon in a few years, but just considering it as a candidate for removal made me want to hear it again.

So last week I decided to replace the built-in hard drive with a larger-capacity model. I know this voids the warranty on my Zune but I really needed that space. ZuneMods.net has instructions on how to do it, and I found a brand new compatible 60GB drive on eBay for 60 bucks. Yesterday, I did it.

Before (note available space is 0) :

It was scary taking it apart. The only real issue was that it wasn’t clear in the instructions how to open the ZIF (zero insertion force) ribbon cable connector, but with a little help from Chronic on the forums at Zune Mods, I figured it out.

After replacing the drive and hooking the battery back up, the Zune detected a blank drive and asked me to connect it to my PC. It upgraded itself to the latest firmware (1.4) and voila:

A few hours later after re-synching all my content (including songs that didn’t fit before and some update snaps of Lina) and updating my wallpaper:

That’s it. It all went remarkably smoothly. Rock on.

Lina’s becoming more and more fun to be with all the time–except when in the middle of a tantrum, which is also becoming more common (”No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no!”). We’re enjoying the former and doing our best not to encourage the latter (it’s amazing how much energy a kid can put into demanding what she wants when all she has to do is say, “cookie please” to get it, but that’s not what this post is about).

One of the cute things she’s doing these days is putting “m’” in front of words, as if to say “my”. If you’ve seen “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and remember Everett (George Clooney) waking up suddenly and shouting, “M’ hair!”, then you have an idea what it sounds like. “M’ hand!” (in her pocket). Me: “Where is Lina’s hand?” Lina (with a big smile): “Gone!” Priceless.

A couple of weeks ago there was a problem with Lina’s daycare so we had to keep her home a couple of days. Since Stephanie teaches in the mornings, I stayed home with Lina for a couple of mornings. It’s not unusual for Lina and me to hang out, but I think we were both enjoying the extra time together. I know I was. We were playing in her room on one of those sunny mornings, when she floored me. She stopped playing, looked up into my eyes seriously, smiled a big smile, and said (in the cutest, sweetest, most sincere and beautiful voice possible, of course), “M’ happy, Papa”. M’ heart nearly exploded. I don’t know where she learned the concept of happiness–school? From us?–or how to apply it to herself, but I do know that she couldn’t have been happier than I was at that moment.

…and Lina has entered it. Today when I got home Stephanie and Lina met me at the bottom of the stairs, as is their wont (and which I enjoy immensely). I always get a beautiful smile from Stephanie, a super-cute smile from Lina, and sometimes a shout of “Papa!” (usually from Lina). Stephanie told me that Teacher Jackie said Lina had been standing on her own today. As Stephanie wrote, Lina’s been pulling up on everything lately, and she’s been working on standing for a while now (I mean free-standing, without a larger human or other stable object to hold onto), and I’ve seen her do it for a couple seconds. But today she was doing it (if a bit wobbly) for extended periods.

And who do you think was the first to head upstairs? That’s right. Lina climbed her first stair today. And so of course she had to climb all of them (she’s like her mother that way), which she did.

It’s 3am, and Lina just cried out and then coughed a few times before quickly falling back asleep. Now I’m awake and thinking about how my life has changed recently and over the years. There are huge and obviously great changes like Stephanie and Lina coming into my life, but then there are the little things, the small influences that people have had, perhaps without knowing it, that can also have big impacts over the years. And that got me thinking about…

What do Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, and Nabeyaki Udon have in common? Okay, probably quite a bit, but for me the answer has to start with “Bill Smith“. My friend Bill, whom I haven’t seen in probably 15 years, introduced me to all three of these.

Bill and I worked together at Simpact Associates, a small (now defunct) software company in San Diego, and one day he suggested we go to the Noodle House for lunch. This was a tiny place in a strip mall in Kearny Mesa, but we’d often have to wait outside the place for half an hour before getting a table to enjoy the delicious Japanese noodles (it was years later when I was studying Japanese that my sensei explained that ramen is Chinese, not Japanese–probably like someone from Mexico patiently explaining that fajitas are American food). Anyway, my love of udon and ramen was born then and in all this time I still haven’t found a satisfactory substitute in Seattle (recommendations welcome).

One day (probably in about 1988 or ‘89) I was over at Bill’s house and he told me about a movie I just had to see: Down by Law. He popped in a VHS tape and we watched the opening scene on his crappy TV, and it changed my life. If there’s a better match of a song to a scene in any movie, I don’t know what it is. The beautiful, simple, black and white panning shots of old, broken down New Orleans combine perfectly with the urgent, haunting sound of the song to put me in exactly the mood I assume Jarmusch was striving for. If you haven’t seen (and heard) it, please, rent it now. Tom Waits (acting and providing the opening and closing tunes), Ellen Barkin, Roberto Benigni, and John Lurie (who also composed the soundtrack). C’mon, you gotta see it. Jarmusch’s patience with a scene is amazing; he’ll linger on a face long after most directors will have cut to the next scene. He gives the scene time to sink in; he’s not afraid to let us feel uncomfortable for a while longer, or to wait for us to see the beauty in the absurdity. If you liked Lost in Translation, you’ll probably enjoy anything Jarmusch has made (and see the influence Jarmusch must have had on Sophia Coppola). Ghost Dog is another of our favorites.

The song, by the way, was Jockey Full of Bourbon, and I didn’t get it out of my head for days. I still can’t hear it without seeing that opening scene in my mind. You can find it on the Rain Dogs CD, but it’s really better to enjoy it the first time as part of the movie. Like Jarmusch, Waits doesn’t really seem to care what the marketing world wants. His music isn’t pretty; it’s tragic and beautiful and haunting. And his ability to turn a simple phrase into a mind-picture is unmatched.

It’s a sad and beautiful world, but my part of it is a perhaps less sad and a little more beautiful thanks to my old buddy Bill.

My lap tends to be a crowded place any time I sit down at home. If there’s not a small human in it, there’s usually a small furry animal. Sometimes, as you can see, two. Occasionally three, but that’s less common now that Lula has grown to epic proportions. Not that they all get along all that well…

Hmm. Is this really a good idea?

I picked up some Moutai at the Duty Free in Beijing. Roy and I shared some of this stuff in the hotel bar at the White Swan and found it quite interesting–strong, but with a finish of tropical fruit and maybe a hint of berry. I think the name translates as something like, “Fresh Quaff Preceeding Ass-kicking.” For the uninitiated, Chinese Spirits are generally over 100 proof, and this is no exception. At the duty free, they had different brands of Moutai that cost anywhere from 32 yuan (yeah, 4 dollars) to well over 1600 yuan ($200). I chose one that was around fifty bucks, figuring I’d get something good enough but not too good to be wasted on a Moutai novice like myself. I probably could have gotten away with a $20 bottle, but hey, it saved me having to change my yuan back to dollars. And anyway, I liked the bottle and I’m a sucker for liquor that includes glassware.

Today I saw a man carrying a ten foot ladder. Riding a bicycle. In rush hour traffic. Which means he was riding in a crowded bike lane with cars weaving this way and that, including into the bike lane. The traffic here really has to be seen (or, better, ridden in) to be believed. The drivers are very skilled–they know exactly how wide and long their cars are and they use every inch. There’s no real concept of right of way; it’s only a suggestion. Yet it all works pretty well. In the US, we have rules. If you follow the rules, something bad is less likely to happen. Problems often occur when one person follows the rules and another doesn’t. Inefficiencies are introduced when people don’t really know the rules about right of way and just try to be nice, like a four-way stop near my house where it’s not uncommon to be last to the intersection and still have the other three cars wait. Or the unwritten “only one car in the intersection at a time” rule that folks in Ballard seem to follow. When you’re traffic control mechanisms are rule based, you run into problems when people think they know the rules but don’t–many people think erroneously that in Washington State it is illegal to honk your horn except in case of emergency. These things would never happen in China.

In China, they have rules, too, but they use them only as guidelines. What matters is not whether some authority has said you can or can’t do something, but rather whether or not something bad will happen if you do something. If nothing bad will happen, then you do it. If something bad might happen, you may still do it, but you try to reduce the likelihood of the bad outcome by, say, honking your horn to let the driver in the car next to you know you are about to cut him off. Or by flashing your lights to let the car that is about to cut you off know that you’re going to step on it to keep him out. It’s a little like sailing–you’re supposed to follow the right of way rules, but even if the other guy doesn’t, it is your responsibility to avoid a collision. In China, this is taken to such an extreme that collision-avoidance is a constant state. In this country, personal responsibility is more important than government guidance when driving.

The best example of this I saw (even better than the fact that a man can ride a bike down a busy street while carrying a ten foot ladder) was a car that swerved into the bike lane, honked the bikes out of the way, accelerated, honked again, and merged back into the traffic lane by cutting off a car. A police car. With its lights flashing.

Both cars continued on their way without any further interaction.

Hmm. It’s starting to seem like every time I post something to this page, it’s about an embarrassing story. Oh, well, here goes.

Yesterday we went to the WalMart in Nanchang. That’s right, WalMart. We’ve been doing a lot of shopping in discount stores in China. In Beijing, there was a Carrefour (a joint French/Chinese WalMart competitor) right next to the hotel, and I think we made four trips there in five days.

Anyway, yesterday we went to the WalMart to stock up on the local brand of formula that Lina is used to: “Hero”. “We”, in this case, was Stephanie, Lina, and me, along with our friend and fellow new parent, Roy. While we (or in this case, I) was at it, I figured I’d pick up a couple bottles of local beer, too.

It was quite crowded near the exit as we headed out the door loaded with plastic grocery bags; I was fumbling for the hotel business card (to show to the taxi driver so he’d know where to take us). I managed to pull it out of my pocket and then a strange thing happened. The load in my left hand suddenly got lighter by approximately the weight of one grocery bag with a couple of large bottles of beer in it. Okay, by exactly the weight of one grocery bag with two large bottles of beer and two jars of baby food in it. A few milliseconds later, there was a very loud bang followed immediately by a couple of screams and much intaking of breath. I looked down to see white foam pouring from a bag on the floor. I looked up to see half of Nanchang (a city of four million people) staring openmouthed at me.

Within about 5 seconds, there was a woman there with a broom and a big dustpan. I barely had time to pull the unbroken jars of babyfood out of the foam before she swept the remains away. We hurried out into the rain to look for a taxi home.